“The man or woman in the early centuries of the Christian tradition who with great seriousness and excitement said ‘I believe’ and then repeated the Christian community’s confession of faith was not attempting to state the personal beliefs of a private individual. On the contrary, the primary intention and meaning of that affirmation was to identify herself or himself as a participating member of a community and a tradition, both of which were quite objective to the individual and, in fact, formative of that individual’s new life.
“Fundamental, important beliefs thus point not so much to a private subjective world as they point to some historical tradition and to the community that bears that tradition and lives from or within it. The symbolic contents of the creed, what was believed, were thus actually more creative of the individual’s inner or subjective life than the reverse; and that public content had that crucial shaping role because it was, in turn, the significant factor creative of the tradition in question, of the community in which every individual lived and acted, of the ‘world’–nature, history, the divine–surrounding the persons in that tradition and community.
“‘Belief’ on the deepest level has reference to the symbolic forms that structure the perspectives, the norms, and thus the life of objective historical communities. This is evident enough in religious communities where there is an explicit correlation or coherent unity among beliefs about reality (expressed in a creed or its equivalent), rules or law covering ordinary behavior, rituals and practices, and thus a total and all-encompassing style of life shared by the whole community.
“To say ‘I believe’ in that context is first of all to associate oneself as participant on the deepest level in such an objective religious and yet also social world borne by a given historical religious tradition and embodied in both the inner and the outer life of each member of that community.”
Langdon Gilkey, Message and Existence. An Introduction to Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1979), 24-25. (Emphasis added.)
2 comments:
Perhaps we should say, "I believe that I should be guided by this historical snapshot of faith in the early church, though it may not have anything to do with the vastly more important realities of the present moment." This would be more in line with the proposed "Covenant of ordination" that would replace our Form of Subscription, and thus makr the end of the CRC's confessional integrity, and the end of the CRC as a confessional church.
That should be: "mark the end of the CRC's confessional integrity (or at least what's left of it)
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